How does story board testing in IBM Rational Functional Tester work?

IBM’s rational functional tester is counted among the best functional testing tools available till date. The functional testing capabilities can further be extended with the help of the SDK proxy. This can be done either manually or with the assistance of the Proxy SDK wizards. 

Introduction of the rational functional tester in the field of software testing has given a new significant direction to the functional testing. The following are the updates that were made then:

1. The visual test representation for the creation of no code test was enhanced via the following two ways:

a)   Dragging and dropping the controls in to the test scripts.

b)   Story board test representation.

2. The integration with the following was updated:

a)   IBM rational quality manager express edition and

b)  IBM rational quality manager standard edition v2.0 and v1.0.1.

Support for multiple project area was extended in the execution adapter and IBM rational quality manager was provided with the support for keywords.

3. New integration were made with the IBM rational team concert:

a)   Assets were bound to be managed within the SCM.

b)   IBM rational team concert V2.0 was added as an optional feature to the rational functional tester.

4. Packaged applications as well as environment support were expanded.

What is Story board testing in IBM Rational Functional Tester?

- Story board testing has been introduced as a completely new and visual approach to the automation of the actions performed by the test scripts.

- The story board testing comes with a three pane view which provides the following:

1. Description of the test actions in a natural language.
2. Screenshots of the screen that is currently being tested. Also if the control is to be used further then it is highlighted.
3. Script flow is displayed in the story board view which shows all the thumbnails of the all the screens that were accessed during the course of the test in an order of sequence.

- This testing approach gives a significant simplification of the test script editing and authoring. 

- The natural language is used all along the testing process along with the screen shots so as to provide the testers an easy way for understanding the flow of the test. 

- The test can be edited from this view as well. 

- You can carry out the following things in the story board testing:

1. Insert verification
2. Execute data driven commands
3. Insert java code

- The feature of story board testing in IBM rational functional testing does not come at the expense of the traditional testing approaches. 

- This testing approach can be considered to be a mere overlay of the java test script like it has always been known to have existed.  

- Users who are very well familiar and understand the IBM rational functional tester can go on with the story board testing as they used to do directly with the test script. 

- Story board testing approach has been accelerating the test creation by keeping it quite simple to read and edit the tests and open the test automation. 

- The story board testing approach was first introduced in the version 8.1 of the IBM rational functional tester.

- This approach did play a big role in enabling the testers in editing the test scripts by playing against the screen shots of the application captured by the rational functional tester. 

- Before this feature was included in the rational functional tester, the scripts were edited by the testers just by modifying it.